She looked for the more important man to help her, but he wasn’t there. Now she remembered what he’d written. A play about Doukhobors that had caused a big row because the Doukhobors were going to have to be naked. Of course they weren’t real Doukhobors, they were actors. And they were not allowed to be naked after all.
She tried explaining this to the man who helped her up, but he was plainly not interested. She asked what he wrote. He said he was not that kind of writer, he was a journalist. Visiting in this house with his son and daughter, grandchildren of the hosts. They — the children — had been passing out the drinks.
“Lethal,” he said, referring to the drinks. “Criminal.”
Now they were outside. She walked in her stocking feet across the grass, barely avoiding a puddle.
“Somebody has thrown up there,” she told her escort.
“Indeed,” he said, and settled her into a car. The outside air had altered her mood, from an unsettled elation to something within reach of embarrassment, even shame.
“North Vancouver,” he said. She must have told him that. “Okay? We’ll proceed. The Lions Gate.”
She hoped he wouldn’t ask what she was doing at the party. If she had to say she was a poet, her present situation, her overindulgence, would be taken as drearily typical. It wasn’t dark out, but it was evening. They seemed to be headed in the right direction, along some water then over a bridge. The Burrard Street bridge. Then more traffic, she kept opening her eyes to trees passing by, then shutting them again without meaning to. She knew when the car stopped that it was too soon for them to be home. That is, at her home.
Those great leafy trees above them. You could not see any stars. But some shine on the water, between wherever they were and the city lights.
“Just sit and consider,” he said.
She was enraptured by the word.
“Consider.”
“How you’re going to walk into the house, for instance. Can you manage dignified? Don’t overdo it. Nonchalant? I presume you have a husband.”
“I will have to thank you first for driving me home,” she said. “So you will have to tell me your name.”
He said that he had already told her that. Possibly twice. But once again, okay. Harris Bennett. Bennett. He was the son-in-law of the people who had given the party. Those were his children, passing out the drinks. He and they were visiting from Toronto. Was she satisfied?
“Do they have a mother?”
“Indeed they do. But she is in a hospital.”
“I’m sorry.”
“No need. It’s quite a nice hospital. It’s for mental problems. Or you might say emotional problems.”
She hurried on to tell him that her husband was named Peter and that he was an engineer and that they had a daughter named Katy.
“Well that’s very nice,” he said, and started to back out.
On Lions Gate Bridge he said, “Excuse me for sounding how I did. I was thinking whether I would or wouldn’t kiss you and I decided I wouldn’t.”
She thought he was saying that there was something about her that didn’t quite measure up to being kissed. The mortification was like being slapped clean back into sobriety.
“Now when we get over the bridge do we go right on Marine Drive?” he continued. “I’ll rely on you to tell me.”